In 1709 (or was it 1710?) the Statute of Anne created the first purpose-built copyright law. This blog, founded just 300 short and unextended years later, is dedicated to all things copyright, warts and all. To contact the 1709 Blog, email Eleonora at eleonorarosati[at]gmail.com

Sunday, 2 June 2013

Towards a Google Tax in Italy too?

On 22 March 2013
last, following the approval of the Bundestag, the German Bundesrat passed a
piece of legislation known as Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverlege (‘LSR’) [or also "Google Tax" law].

By adopting this
new law, Germany extended press publishers’ copyright by providing them
with an ancillary right over news contents. The newly created sections 87f and 87g of the
Urheberrechtsgesetz [the German
Copyright Act] provide for
the exclusive right of press publishers to exploit their contents commercially
for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators (like Google
News) from displaying
excerpts from newspaper articles without paying a fee.

The stated
objective of the LSR is to recoup
some of the revenues traditional news publishers have lost to the web. With
particular regard to news aggregators, two studies of the Iowa University
and ETH and Boston University respectively, have found that not only are these
unlikely to have complementary effects on the number of visits to newspapers'
homepages, but rather appear to have a substitution effect, which is said to
have contributed to declining online traffic in the past few years (see here).

Under-secretary Giovanni Legnini

Although
personally I am against laws like the LSR, in that I am afraid that they might
have anti-competitive effects and push the boundaries of IP protection a bit
too far (although by means of ancillary rights only), there are rumours that
the German example might not remain an isolated experience in Europe.

Readers will
remember that there was a time when also France was considering introducing a
law similar to the LSR (here and here). However,
similarly to what had happened in Belgium (here), this idea was abandoned
following Google's settlement with French press publishers (here).

Now it seems that also Italy might be about to enter the "Google Tax" debate.

This morning Corriere della Sera published an interview
with Giovanni Legnini (under-secretary to the
Presidency of the Council of Ministers in charge of publishing and
implementation of Government's agenda), in which he spoke about possible
measures in favour of Italian press publishers.

Among other things, Legnini mentioned the need for search engines to give their contribution to help Italian
press system's renovation and innovation.

Probably cuter than the kind of "help" Italy might want from Google

The
under-secretary highlighted that newspapers and press publishers in
general have been subject to a dramatic drop in terms of advertisement revenues
and public contribution [the latter is quite a heated political topic at the
moment]. Those who have
instead increased their revenues have been search engines.Therefore, Enrico Letta’s Government might “ask” these subjects to "help" renovate the press publishing system. How this will be done, however, will be explained in due time.

In the meantime,
Italian Communication Authority (AGCOM) president Angelo Cardani has confirmed that
plans to adopt an online copyright enforcement regulation are well and alive (here), although it is currently
being discussed whether Italian
Parliament should legislate in the area of copyright first. As AGCOM fans will
remember, the latter is no new topic (here).

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